I just need to soak up 14 points of damage with my 4 HP and a healing potion that heals 5. Shit.

Last time we talked about Card Crawl from small, 2-person dev team Tinytouchtales, we really didn’t have any clue what to make of it. We knew it used a 54-card deck and that those cards, somehow, formed a dungeon. I’ve been fortunate enough to try out a pre-release version of Card Crawl and I’m happy to report we were on the right path, but there’s a lot more to it.

The Card Crawl play area consists of 2 rows. The bottom row contains your in-game avatar as well as two slots for your hands and an extra slot for your backpack. The upper row consists of cards being dealt from the aforementioned 54-card deck which makes up the dungeon. The deck consists of weapons, shields, potions, special abilities, and way too many monsters. Seriously, there are a lot of monsters. Your job is to collect the items and abilities and use them to remove the monsters until there are no cards left in the deck. You score points based on how much gold you collect on your journey, either from picking up gold cards or from selling items back to the dealer.

It all sounds simple, and it is, but the complications arrive when you realize that you can only use each slot once per turn, but you also need to remove 3 cards from the top row each turn. So, when you get double swords, you might have to sell one for gold just to move forward. Or, do you fight that goblin and take the full hit to your HP hoping to draw a potion card on the next turn and save the sword for later?

Overall, Card Crawl isn’t a Thunderstone-like dungeon crawl, but a simple puzzle game with a dungeon theme. That said, I’ve been having a really great time with it so far. I’ve played 7 games thus far and have yet to win a game, although I’ve repeatedly gotten the deck down to zero cards before succumbing to wounds.

Card Crawl will be arriving on iOS next week. Check out the release trailer after the break.

I was over at Slitherine yesterday talking to director Iain McNeil and–you’re gonna love this–he told me that Apple have rejected Buzz Aldrin’s Space Program Manager because the game “contains well-known third parties”. Bwuh?

Buzz Aldrin’s Space Program Manager has been in production at Polar Motion for a couple of years, with Slitherine publishing. The game is meant to be a spiritual successor to the classic space sim Race Into Space, and is being made with significant input from Buzz himself — America’s most storied (and pugilistic) living astronaut. So for maximum clarity: this is a Buzz Aldrin-endorsed game being made (in part) by Buzz Aldrin. How Aldrin can be considered a third party to a game he worked on (a fact that Slitherine’s App Store description trumpets all over the place) is beyond me. Meanwhile, just a week ago, Apple approved a game taking the mickey out of Kim Jong Un, so somebody tell me how this “well-known third parties” thing is supposed to work.

McNeil just sort of shrugged his shoulders about the whole thing. “We thought we were pretty safe this time,” he told me. “It’s one of the only Slitherine games I can think of with no violence or guns.” The game does feature flags, though — we know that Apple gets touchy about those sometimes.

After the “realistic violence” fiasco and the German/Soviet “enemies” affair, I feel bad for the Apple approvals people. They get mocked when they mess up and don’t get noticed at all when they do their jobs right. So let’s just thank them for giving Slitherine a reason to tell us that Buzz Aldrin’s Space Program Manager will be out for iPad soon — assuming this nonsense gets cleared up.

Level 99? Pretty much how we played 1st edition, although my character, Indiana Smith, had all 32 Teeth of the Dahlver-Nar as well.

Knights of Pen & Paper was an RPG from Brazilian developer Behold Studios who are currently knee-deep with their super sentai game, Chroma Squad. Thus, we were a bit surprised to hear of a sequel to Knights of Pen & Paper coming out on May 14, until we saw that Behold wasn’t the developer for the sequel. No, this one is being done by KYY Games and published by Paradox Interactive.

Knights of Pen & Paper puts you in the shoes of not just nerds with character sheets at the ready, but also thrusts you behind the DM screen and has you making decisions on where the adventure goes. The sequel follows the same road, but changes things up a bit. For starters, instead of the simulated 8-bit graphics, the graphics will now be simulated 16-bit graphics. I can only wait for Knights of Pen & Paper 14 when we reach simulated Dejarik graphics. It’s not just the look, however, we’re also getting new racial feats, a new d20 combat system, and, of course, more jokes.

We have a new trailer after the break, but it doesn’t show any gameplay. That said, it’s still a fun trailer and gives you a glimpse into the kind of humor you can expect in the Knights of Pen & Paper games.

Actual screenshots were hard to come by, so I’m just including this pic of Owen’s laptop.

Other than Philip Marlowe, the best Raymond Chandler character might just be the city of Los Angeles itself. It’s more than just a setting, it has a beating, rotten heart that underlies each and every novel. Criminel is a new noir detective game that treats its settings with the same gravitas. Criminel’s setting, however, is 19th century Paris which sounds just about perfect.

Criminel puts you in the shoes of a detective hunting down murder suspects in turn of the century Paris and, if it plays anywhere as good as the trailer looks, we’re in for a treat (although the “where CSI began” tagline doesn’t really feel necessary).

Not much else to tell you about this one, other than it will be released this Wednesday night for iOS Universal and will cost $2. Check out the two trailers after the break.

]]>http://www.pockettactics.com/news/ios-news/big-sommeil-criminel-launching-week/feed/0http://www.pockettactics.com/news/ios-news/big-sommeil-criminel-launching-week/Screenshots from Gambit, the first expansion for Star Realms, coming to iOS & Android later this weekhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PocketTactics-MobileStrategyGameReviewsForAndroidIpadAndIphone/~3/Hm00hQKAH90/
http://www.pockettactics.com/news/ios-news/screenshots-gambit-first-expansion-star-realms-coming-ios-android-later-week/#commentsMon, 02 Mar 2015 10:23:48 +0000http://www.pockettactics.com/?p=29411

Less than 12 parsecs?

The thing I get the most emails about is beard-grooming advice, followed closely by mewling requests to stop holding the world for ransom from my sinister lair high atop Mount Hexmap. But number 3 is definitely PT readers wondering what the heck is up with Star Realms.

The sci-fi flavoured deck-building card game got a good write-up from us last year and it did even better over at Board Game Geek, where it pulled down a fistful of Golden Geek Awards. It’s a nifty little card game that had some UI wonkiness in its iOS and Android incarnations, and it had a strong tang of “pre-expansion” gameplay — there were a lot of obvious open sockets waiting to be hooked up to more elaborate gameplay mechanics.

The Gambit expansion for the Star Realms base set came out on cardboard back in 2013, and it’ll hit desktops and mobile versions of Star Realms this Thursday, White Wizard Games told me this morning. Gambit cards are randomly dealt to the players at the beginning of the game and allow the player that holds them to bend certain rules, encouraging players to pursue different gameplay styles. It’s a neat idea and the expansion is generally well-reviewed on tabletop. Perhaps even better: there’s two new chapters included in the much-admired single-player campaign. Gambit will be available as a single in-app purchase for $4.

Besides the new cards, there’s been some welcome tweaks and additional functionality to the Star Realms app, and everybody will get these improvements when the game updates this week, whether or not you buy the new card set. There’s a new update feed which will help you stay on top of your asynchronous games (a big pain in the engines in 1.0), an option for faster card animations, online leaderboards, and new tips and hints to smooth out the learning curve for new players.

Lots more images from the expansion after the jump.

Two new single-player chapters.

The should have told me that ex-girlfriend was going to be in this.

Gambits in action.

There’s a kill screen coming up.

The ship names are still pretty pedestrian.

]]>http://www.pockettactics.com/news/ios-news/screenshots-gambit-first-expansion-star-realms-coming-ios-android-later-week/feed/0http://www.pockettactics.com/news/ios-news/screenshots-gambit-first-expansion-star-realms-coming-ios-android-later-week/The weekend that time forgot: The Curious Expedition is available to play until Mondayhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PocketTactics-MobileStrategyGameReviewsForAndroidIpadAndIphone/~3/fiSwKkmMmjA/
http://www.pockettactics.com/news/ios-news/weekend-time-forgot-curious-expedition-available-play-monday/#commentsSat, 28 Feb 2015 18:32:12 +0000http://www.pockettactics.com/?p=29405

Now before you start clicking links from your iPad or Android tablet or Chumby — this current pre-release alpha build of The Curious Expedition is a weighty HTML 5 monster that runs best on a desktop browser. I got it running on my iPad once but the incantations required are much too dark to share on a public forum such as this. So take a break from House of Cards and play it on your computer for a bit this weekend. If you like it (and I reckon you will) you can shell out a few bucks to get early access.

The Curious Expedition is a crackerjack of a game we’ve talked about a coupleof times before: you take on the role of one of the great names of the 19th and 20th centuries like Nicola Tesla and Amelia Earhart and lead expeditions into randomly-generated (and increasingly more dangerous) jungles, testing the patience of the indigenous folks and avoiding wild animals to find lost treasures. It’s actually even weirder than that: there’s Toltec gold and valleys full of dinosaurs and a lot of other stuff that might have been mined from a drunk Jules Verne/Arthur Conan-Doyle spitballing session. The Curious Expedition will get a native tablet app edition once development wraps on the web-based game, German devs Maschinen-Mensch tell us.

It seems like the Game Mechanic of the Year for 2015 is going to be sanity: keeping your characters in touch with reality figures prominently in The Curious Expedition, as it does in Darkest Dungeon and Sunless Sea. Is that a sign of our growing preoccupation with mental health as a new generation of combat veterans reintegrates into civilian life? Or a murmur in our collective subconscious as the Great Old Ones awaken in the black depths of the Pacific? It’s gotta be one of those two.

Back in late 2013 the digital gamebook market was experiencing a renaissance. inkle Studios had released the magnificent Sorcery! series earlier in the year, and in November Lone Wolf came to iPad, and it was unlike any gamebook we’d ever seen. When you held your device in portrait mode, it was a beautfully illustrated tome, but when you needed to jump into action, turn your device to portrait mode and have at it with 3D combat.

Sounds great and it was, kind of. Turns out the combat was actually pretty crappy: repetitive, long, and consisting of nothing more than repeated quick time events. Luckily the story was good enough to make you want to see it to the end, and now you can all in one package. Previously, you could buy the first chapter of Lone Wolf and then purchase the remaining chapters as IAP. Now, however, you can buy the complete Lone Wolf saga in one app with no IAP in sight.

If you pick it up today, you can nab it for only $10 as well, which is $3 cheaper than it will be when you wake up tomorrow. Lone Wolf Complete is available for either iOS Universal or Android.

Have no idea what we’re talking about? Check out the trailer after the jump.

Two new releases that are flaunting the usual Wednesday night release convention and just popped up on the app stores this morning. It’s anarchy, I tell you! Dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria.

The first is Arnhem: Airborne Assault, a scrappy little wargame from Richard Berger. It’s not going to win any beauty contests unless all of the other contestants are members of AC/DC but it seems like a pretty good little hex-and-counter wargame. It’s a WWII affair that puts you in charge of the Allied paratroopers making the ill-fated airborne assault on Holland in 1944. The combat model is big on fog-of-war, so considerations like moving your troops through forests and maintaining contact with the enemy are a big deal. There’s a couple of genuinely tough scenarios in there, but I haven’t spent enough time with the game to decide if it’s Clever Tough™ or Throw Your iPad in the Canal Tough™. You can find out for yourself for two bucks: it’s available for iPad and for Android, too. This one’s got online multiplayer for up to four players, too.

A gameplay video of this, plus another new release below.

Here’s creator Richard Berger explaining Arnhem.

Belgian devs Monkube have just released Blastball MAX, which is not the new name for baseball that MLB announced to attract a younger audience, but a puzzler designed by Kris Burm, an abstract game designer with a renowned portfolio of tabletop games, including YINSH, which is currently the #1 abstract on BGG. It’s got a slightly garish gold-and-purple aesthetic that wouldn’t look out of place in Prince’s house — but I don’t consider that a negative. This one’s in Kelsey’s review queue right now.